hodder, ian - two approaches to an archaeology of the social - 2002

8/12/2019 HODDER, Ian - Two Approaches to an Archaeology of the Social - 2002

1/5

320 American Anthropologist Vol. 104 No. 1 March 2002and places providing wide vistas are all commonly seen asplaces linking different levels and states of existence andas forms of power. James E. Brady and Wendy Ashmore(AK, pp. 124-145) describe how mountains, caves, andwater orient and order the Maya world, strongly influenc-ing architecture and other aspects of their culture. As inpapers discussed earlier, the earth is seen as sacred andanimateas Earth Lord. Caves, pits, and waterholes areconceptual counterparts, linking living people with theearth and with the ancestors. Structures are conceived ofmetaphorically as hills and temples atop the pyramidalmountains interpreted as symbolic caves. Maarten van deGuchte (AK, pp. 149-168) reports that in the Inca worldideologically important landscape featuresthe ritual/sa-cred places known ashuacaare marked only by rocks ortextiles and can be identified only through ethnohistoricaldescriptions. Together with a system of lines calledcequesthese provided a key to the ritual landscape, incorporatinginformation about the ritual calendar and social relation-ships.The final paper to be described, by Lisa Kealhofer (AK,pp. 58-82), shifts to a very different time and place. Itdeals with social rather than sacred landscapes, describinghow spacespecifically garden spacewas used by thesettlers of colonial Virginia to establish, negotiate, andmaintain community and individual social identity (p.76) and how this reflects aspects of economics, politics,and social organization in colonial Virginia.

As can be expected in collections such as these, thepapers vary considerably in quality. A small minority ofpapers in each volume suffer from good ideas poorly con-veyed by bad writing. In addition, a few papers are marredby discussions of postmodernist concerns that seem de-signed more to show off the authors' intellectual prowess,knowledge of recent philosophical fads, and political biasesthan to contribute to our understanding of landscapes. 1encountered remarkably few obvious errors; the only onesnoted both being in the Ucko and Layton collection. The

first is on p, 112 in the Darvill paper where, in reference tothe entrances to Durrington Walls, the text should read southeast rather than southwest ; a little further on,reference is made to flint mines to the northwest of Dur-rington Walls, but Figure 8.1 shows them as being to thenortheast. The second occurs on p. 468 in the paper byMcGlade, where one reads, over the past 2,000 yearsspanning the first neolithic colonisations, through thelater Iberian and Romanisation periods, which is notonly obviously an error but also makes it difficult to inter-pret the statement in the following paragraph that thepri-mary goal of the project was to gain an understanding ofthe dynamics affecting the region spanning a period cov-ering the last 2,500 years.

Together, the two volumes provide a broad overviewof the kinds of work being carried out in landscapearchae-ology in the early to mid-1990s. Both include contribu-tions that are interesting, thought provoking, and useful.Both range widely around the world and throughtime.Be-ing the longer of the two, the Ucko and Layton volumenaturally provides a wider range of perspectives, but any-one interested in the interaction between cultures and thelandscape will find something of value in each. Both are,in my opinion, valuable contributions to the literatureand well worth reading.REFERENCES CITEDFox, Sir Cyril193 2 The Personality of Britain.Cardiff:Nation al Museum ofWales.Renfrew,Colin1973 Mo num ents, Mo bilization and Social Organization inNeo-lithic Wessex.In The Explan ation of Culture Change, ColinRe-frew,ed., pp.53 9-55 8. London: Duckworth.Trigger, BruceG.1968 TheDeterminants of SettlementPatterns.InSettlementAr-chaeology,K.C.Chang,ed. , pp. S3-78.PaloAlto,CA:NationalPress (Mayfield).Willey,Gordon1953 Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the ViniValley,Peru BAEBulletin 155.Washington,DCU.S.Government Printing Office.

w Approaches to an Archaeology of the SocialI A N H O D D E RStanford UniversitySocial Theory in Archaeology. Michael Brian Schiffer, ed.Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000. 235 pp.Social Transformations In Archaeology: Global and Lo-cal Perspectives. Kristian Kristiansen and Michael Row.lands.London: Routledge, 1998. 438 pp.In approaching the edited volume by Schiffer, 5


2/5


3/5

32 2 American Anthropo logist Vo l. 104 No. 1 March 2002role of archaeology. Through much of the book, socialtheory exists in a social vacuum, as apolitical and decon-textualized. A welco me con trast is provided in the chapterby Zedeno. H e exam ines the politics of the construction ofthe past (see also Kus's and Thomas's chapters), and pro-vides a fascinating account of how Native American no-tions of place in the landscape confl icted with, and lostout to, government definitions of bounded space. H eshows how anthropologists col luded in this process. Buteven here, the attempt founders because of the refusal todevelop a social theorythat is, to consider the full rangeof social life rejected by Schiffer. Zedeno argues that placesin the landscape are social ly and m eaningfully constitutedas "sacred geographies" or "symbolic landscapes." How-ever, rather than therefore embracing a full analysis ofsuch complexities, he takes a behavioral twist and sud-denly says that we should "first define landscape materi-ally" (p. 105). W e sho uld start off b y defining a place's for-mal and performance characteristics. On the one hand, heaccepts that a place becomes a landmark through a socialprocess but then argues that it can be defined separatelyfrom tha t process This con fusio n stem s from a limitedview of social theory, which derives from the behaviorism,materialism, and positivism that Schiffer espouses. Theunfortunate result is that Zedeflo argues that the cause ofNative American groups can somehow be furthered by de-scribing their sacred sites in terms of objective performancecharacteristicsa very Western and contemporary view.

Because so many of the chapters take a very limitedview of social theory it seems very remarkable that theterm is used to title the book. Few in other disciplines, orin anthropology, would recognize this book as about so-cial theory at all, at least as it is widely understood. And,certainly, it is difficult to identify any unified alternative.The chapters in the volume are highly diverse; there is noadhe rence to any general propos itions. Is there even thelimited amount of bridge building that Schiffer claims? Ifound the chapters by, on the one hand, Kus, Thomas, andSpencer-Wood, so divergent from those of O'Brien and Ly-man or Feinman that came away with a greater sense ofthe fragmentation of archaeology than ever before. For ex-ample, far from building bridges, the different approachesto power diverge radically. For Arnold, power is linked tothe control over labor. But, for Kus, there are many formsof power, and Thomas specifically rejects the limited defi-nition of power as control over labor and resources, and,instead, prefers a perspective derived from Foucault.

1 cam e to dee ply regret that m ore bridges were notbuilt and that the different traditions seem so unaware ofeacii other's work. It seemed unproductive tiiat Fcinman'sdistinction between ostentatious and "laceless" power (p.14) did not refer to the parallel distinction between natu-ralizing and masking forms of power (Miller and i'ilieyI''H4), or that his distinction between network and corpo-rate societies did not rcler to Foucault's break betweencentered and distributed power (Miller and Tilley il>84). Itseemed inilielpliil that Arnold claimed to have a Marxist

inspired view of social change but made no reference toth e structural Marxist tradition of Friedman and Rowlandsand Kristiansen (see below ). Ne lson discusses the aban-donment of places and mentions meaning, contextualiza-tion, and nego tiation but do es no t ma ke any use of theenor mo us literature on the social theory of memory (e.g,Rowlands 1993), th e in ven tion of tradition, locales, or theabandonment and revisiting of sites (Barrett 1994; Bradley1993). I was depressed to find that Zedeflo could discussth e ritual dep osit ion of artifacts (p. 107) with out any refer-ence to the large amount of social theoretical work on thistop ic (Barrett 199 4; H ill 19 92 ; Richards and Thomas1984).

All these latter topics are discussed by Kristiansen andRowlands in their volum e of largely republishedpapersSo-cial Transformations nArchaeology. Like Schiffer, they seemworried by the hybridity of contemporary archaeologicaltheo rizing, a stanc e tha t pro bably d erives from their long-term c om m itm en t to structural-Marxism (p, 15). Certainlythey do provide d iscussions of m any of those aspects ofthe social dismissed by Schiffersuch as symbols, beliefs,and culture. And, unlike the Schiffer compendium, thereis some u nity of theoretical position . Again, thereis adan-ger that a single-minded pursuit of a limited perspectiveleads to a rejection of what so many people accept todayas fundamental to any consideration of the social, bi addi-tion, the unified perspective offered, while undoubtedlyimporta nt in its time the 1970s and 1980scould beconsidered rather dated at the start of the 21st century.Why should the reader be interested in a set if papers thatgo back to the 1970s and that use a structural-Marxistap-proach that the autho rs th em selve s recognize fell out offavor in th e social science s from the m id-1980s (p. 11)?How will such papers help us to understand the socialto-day?

The introductory chapter by Rowlands and Kristian-sen is an a ttem pt to an swer th ese q uestions . They restatetheir position at the start, to "remain committed to an ar-chaeology which investigates the existence of social reali-ties th at to so m e de gree lie be yo nd , or are repressed by,th e s cop e of con scio us experien ce" (p . 4). Their main in-flue nce s are Althus ser, Braudel, and W allerstein. Theyspend mu ch time in the introduction salvaging somethingof long-term objective structures in the face of theriseolpractice t heor ies, th e lin guistic turn, an d the recent wide-spread acceptance of the dominance of the discursive andthe ph en om en olo gic al in European prehistoric archaeol-ogy. They ask us not to reject social evolutionary views,and they make a plea for retaining an emphasis on politi-cal, historical, and objective structures.

It is useful to haveareprint ing of so ma ny classic textsIroin th e structural Marx ism o f European prehistoric ar-ch ae olo gy in the 197 0s and 198 0s. Many of these texts setthe agend a for m an y prehistoric archaeologists for decades.For example, chapter 3 by Rowlands reflects that excitingperiod in the 1980s when the prestige goods model, larft-Iv derived from Friedman, was taking hold In archaeology-


4/5

Book Rev iew Essays 3 2 3Shifts in ranking and social complexity were now seen inrelation to the control of exchange and the intensificationof production, in contrast to the earlier Chil-dean concep-tion of a European "individualism" emerging in theBronze Age. This more systematic and evolutionary ap-proach has had a huge impact.

Still, why should we be interested in such an ap-proach today, given all the criticisms that have been lev-eled against it, and given all the attempts in archaeologyto move toward practice, agency, discourse, and the phe-nomenological? One of the main disappointments I hadin thisbookisthat so little new was written for it.Bythismean that, apart from the introduc tion, which is generaland limited in scope, there is no real discussion of criti-cisms and new developments. For example, the classic(1978) paper by Frankenstein and Rowlands, here repro-ducedaschapter 13, has led to widespread discussion andcritique (e.g., by Gosden 1985), and it would have beengood toseesome response.

Sothe well-rehearsed critiques of evolutionary, objec-tivist perspectives seem as relevant as they ever were. Inchapter 4, Kristiansen identifies "chiefly lineages" inmegalithic burial in southern Scandinavia, and change isseen asthe result of con tradictions between the forces andrelations of production. He talks of "theocra tic chiefdomsof the Bronze Age" (p. 91), which can be compared withPolynesian and M elanesian chiefdoms. Today there would,think, be less emphasis on off-the-shelf evo lutionary cate-gories and more attempts would be made to understandspecific forms of articulation of ritual, space, time, power,andsoon. In chapter 5, Kristiansen argues that the primefactors leading to greater social differentiation were pres-tige goods and the control of bronze. This was all excitingwhen first published (in the 1970s and 1980s), but whenviewed after t he d eba te that has taken place since, it seemsremarkable that no attempt is made to discuss the micro-technologies of power embodimen t, landscape s, and m a-terial practices. No atte mpt is made to "make sense of" theevidenceeither in terms of re dingorexperiencing It wouldhavebeen helpful to have som e expansion of the accou ntto consider these alternative or more recent approaches.

In these accounts from the 1970s and 1980s, relationsof dominance and hierarchy depend directly on the ma-nipulation of relations of circulation and exchange (p.176). There is an assumption that wealth can be measuredin terms of the consumption of ornaments and weaponsin graves and hoards, whereas deposition came to be dis-cussed in terms of discourses of cultural practice (Barrett1994; Richards and Thomas 1984; Thomas 1996) in muchof prehistoric European archaeology. Kristiansen's classic(1978) study of the wear on ornaments and swords (repro-duced here as chapter 7) sees the wear in terms of econo-miesof supply and d em and rather th an In terms of chang-ing socialpractices.The second part of t he book includes chapters dealingwth center-periphery relations and with a tradition ofscholarship that Includes Frank, Wallersteiu, Ekhohu, and

Wolf.Kristiansen and Rowlands have again had enorm ousinfluence in introducing this approach in European pre-history. Here they do respond to some extent to the cri-tique th at 2nd-m illennium B.C. Bronze Age and Iron Agesystems are different from the capitalist systems for whichWorld Systems models were developed. They move towardan account of large-scale spatial interactions, but if any-thing is to be ieft of center-periphery models, surely the reshould be some demonstration of unequal dependence be-tween center and periphery, or of devolutionary processesin the periphery. The World Systems approach has hadenormous value in exploiting the large scale of archae-ological data, and in breaking out of parochial accounts.Kristiansen and Rowlands have shown that long distanceexchange with the Mediterranean may have been linkedto social processes within prehistoric Europe. There mayhave been some (perhaps limited) social and econom ic de-pendenc y. I remain u nconvinced that this justifies the useof World Systems models. Unequal depen dence and devo-lutionary processes have not, in my view, been demon-strated. As a number of authors have pointed out, there isa need for a greater contextualization of the modelswithin a fuller account of the social and cultural (Gosden1985;Treherne 1995).

It was not until the end of these tw o books on "the so-cial" that found adequate accounts of what was lookingforsomething that escaped from the narrow strictures ofSchiffer's behavioralism and Friedman's structural Marx-ism, something that engaged in contemporary debates.The two chapters by Rowlands at the end of the book, onritual killing in Benin, and on embodiment in Cameroon,mark significant moves toward a more contemporary en-gagement. Both appear to have been written recently, es-pecially for th e book. Chapter 15 describes how the threatof colonial incursion affected West African kingiy powerand its mythoprax is. Colonialism is situated w ithin a localworld of sacrifice and divinebelief in contrast to the em-phasis on exchange and production in the earlier chapters.

Chapter 16 is a fascinating account of the embodi-ment of power in Cameroon. Rowlands is concerned hereto dissolve for West Africa oppositions of person and thingand to destabilize ideas about instrumental power. Suchoppositions and ideas were central to prestige goods mod-els,and it is useful to see them dismissed here. Beliefs andrituals are not seen as utilitarian, as in th e prestige goodsmodels, but are seen as constitutive of the social world.Power is not general but is about a particular conceptionof bodies, body substances, and flows. The account ofpower is here muc h m ore subtle, focusing on the de tails ofbody practices and beliefs.

The two books under review deal in very differentways with the social in archaeology, and both make im-portant contributions. The former reflects some of the di-versity of contemporary archaeological theorizing abouttile social. The latter provides a useful historical overviewof tile contributions of a very influential pair of writersand of structural Marxism in archaeology. But both are


5/5

32 4 American Anthropologist Vo l. 104 No. 1 March 2002stymied by a tendency to restrict the definition of the so-cial. Schiffer's exclusions were listed at the start of this re-view, and the objectivism and evolutionism of structural-Marxism as it has been used in archaeology provide theirown blinkers. But we see, toward the end of the Kristian-sen and Rowlands book and in some of the chapters in theSchiffer volume, a fuller account of the social that entersinto contemporary debates. We see how debate in archae-ology has moved on to a consideration of the ways inwhich embedded and embodied material practices consti-tuted and transformed the social.REFERENCES CITEDBarre t t, Joh n1994 Fragm ents from Antiquity. Oxford: Blackwell.Bradley, Richard1993 Altering the Earth. Edinburgh : Society of Antiquaries of Scot-l and Monograph 8 .Gos den , Chr i s1985 Gifts and Kin in Early Iron Age Europe. Ma n 20:47 5-4 93.

Hi l l , J . D .1992 Ritual an d Rub bish in th e Iron Age of Wessex. Oxford: Tem-pus Repara tum.Miller, Danny, and Chris Tiliey1984 Ideology, Power an d Prehistory.Cambridge:Cam bridge University Press.Richards, Col in , and Jul ian Thom as1984 Ritual Activity and Structu red Dep osition in Later NeolithicWessex.InNeo lithic Studies:AReview of Som e Cur ren t Research.R.Bradley an d J. Gar dine r, ed s. Pp. 189 -21 8. British Archaeologi-cal Reports B ritish Series, 133.Rowlands , Michael1993 The Roie of Mem ory in th e Transmission of Culture. WorldArchaeology 25:141-151 .Schiffer, Michael B.1999 The Material life of Hum an B eings. Londo n: Routledge.T hom as , J u l ian1996 Time, Culture and Identity. Cambridg e: Cambridge Univer-sity Press.T rehem e , Pau l1995 The W arrior 's Beauty: The Ma sculine Body and Self-Identityin BronzeAgeEurope . Journ al of Eu ropean Archaeology3( l ) :105-144 .

Modern ReflexBILL MAURERUniversity of California, IrvineFacing Modernity: Ambivalence, Reflexivity and Mo-rality. Barry Smart. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publica-tions, 1999.206 pp.Questions of Modernity. Timothy Mitchell, ed. Minnea-polis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 229 pp.If, for 19th- and ear y-20th-century European intellectu-als, modernity was experienced as a disruption of themoral and epistemological bases of social and political life,for contemporary knowledge it is the sedimented butunstable ground of social scientific practice. Europeanscharacterized the "modern" in ways that are familiar to ustoday because those characterizations formed the founda-tions of the social scientific endeavor. Concepts like "al-ienation," "anomie," and "ideology," as well as suppos-edly first-order descriptive terms like family individualan d community have structured that version of human in-quiry caiied "social." Sociology's objects would be thecauses and the products of the disruption of life that con-jured the social and the individual from the communitythat Europeans imagined their own pre-modern to havebeen, its object would be modernityitself.Anthropology'sob|ects, constituting its disciplinary apparatus and achiev-ing for it a place at the table of modern inquiry, would betlir peoples who Europeans imagined had not undergonethat same disruption. Anthropology's objects, the core ofits self-constitution as modern, would be the nouuiodern.After World War 11,tile disciplines converged in visions ofdevelopment and modernization: sociology would tackle

the "social problems" of modern life and anthropologywould identify the "barriers" preventing nonmodernsfrom acquiring the moral and material goods of civiliza-tion . The new world society th at the social scienceswoulddocument and help to create would represent the inevita-ble and one-way motion toward the end of ideology andthe end of analysis, as, eventually, the analytical appara-tus w ould resonate precisely w ith the clockwork harmonyof the real world.It did not happen. And it is this predictive failure ofsocial science and the unfolding of other possibilities thatanimates the books under review. Composed of sevenchapters that review theorists from Foucault and Lyotardto C. W right M ills an d U lrich Beck, Smart's volume isabout the fate of so ciology after the exhaustion ofits modemparadigms. Smart centers on a new appreciation of theo-retical ref lexiv ity an d a mb iva lenc e. T he literature Smartdraws on and the debates he engages are from sociology,prim arily (a nd refr eshin gly) ou tsid e its neopositivist U.S.formulation. Despite the disciplinary focus, this book willbe accessible to a range of anthropologists seeking to bebrou ght up to sp eed on recent social theory and a reflec-tion o n mo dern ity that em pha sizes th e ethics of socialthoug ht. Timo thy M itchell's volume containsashortpref-ace an d intro duc tion situating it in a conversation be-tween Middle East and South Asia area scholars who arered efin ing area stud ies as a theo retica l project and devel-op ing acco un ts of mo dern ities o utside th e West, "redis-cover|ingj the parochialism of the West" rather than "*pa roc hia liz|ing | W estern history and social science" IPviii). T he v olum e conta ins a chapter by Mitchell fivechapters on South Asia, and two on the Middle East.

hodder, ian - two approaches to an archaeology of the social - 2002

Documents